Method & making
Monte is a live Monte-Carlo integration. A rounded solid turns inside a unit box; forty-eight thousand random points are tested against it, and the fraction that land inside — times the box volume — is the estimate, printed with a confidence band that narrows as the count grows. Built for anyone who has ever wondered how you measure a shape too awkward to integrate by hand.
Some volumes have no tidy formula. The old answer, from Los Alamos to modern option pricing, is to stop integrating and start guessing well: scatter random points through a known volume, count how many fall inside your shape, and the ratio is your answer. Pile up enough guesses and the noise averages into a number you can trust — its error shrinking like one over the square root of the count.
Monte renders that idea in space. The shape is deliberately awkward — a rounded box smoothly fused with a sphere, a form with no clean closed volume — and it exists on screen only as the density of hot dust that happened to fall inside it. The instrument beside it never stops re-measuring.
Argued from the subject: a near-black laboratory void so a single teal reads as signal against noise. The teal is reserved for marks — inside-dust and strokes — never for body text; the copy runs on a separate light ink that clears 4.5:1 comfortably.
Sora for display — a geometric sans with a clean, technical calm that suits an instrument. Space Mono for every number, so the estimate, band and counts sit on tabular figures and never twitch as they update.
three.js, one InstancedMesh. Up to 48,000 dust dots are a single instanced draw call. Each dot's position is a seeded random point in the box; a signed-distance test — smax of a rounded box and a sphere — classifies it inside or out, once, at build. Inside dots are scaled up and coloured on a depth ramp so the core of the solid glows brighter than its skin.
The estimator. A cumulative inside-count array makes the running estimate O(1): at any sample count N, the volume is (inside/N)·8 and the 95% band is 1.96·8·√(p(1−p)/N). The true volume is measured once at load by a dense 260k-point reference and drawn as the dashed line the estimate chases in the convergence sparkline.
The signature. The solid is never drawn as geometry — it emerges purely from the hot dust that fell inside it. The whole cloud rotates as one rigid body inside the wireframe box; on a slow loop the dust clears and re-pours, so you watch the estimate re-converge and the confidence band draw tight from scratch. Depth fog and a vignette give the chamber its dimensionality.
Robustness. Device-pixel-ratio capped at 2, sized to the viewport with a resize handler, the render loop paused on document.hidden, a WebGL context-loss listener, and a CSS fallback scene if the GPU never arrives. Reduced-motion renders one settled, fully-converged frame.
smax — landing a believable non-round true volume of 1.72 in a box of 8.document.hidden, and a WebGL context-loss listener drops to the CSS fallback.